Or, at least he keeps using the breaker he bought from this year. The nut size is larger than any he's carried in the eight years I've been buying from him. Many of the pieces are into the stove coal size range, so it's like having a nut/stove mix that seems to work well for some stoves with a large pot.

The Glenwoods with prismatic grates have a pretty large space between grates and that space gets a lot larger quickly as you rotate the grate. I think this is the reason for the preference for stove coal, as the larger pieces don't drop through as easily. Leaving more ash on the grate and shaking with very short strokes makes the problem less.

These are very aggressive grates but clear the ash very quickly and easily. You just have to learn the technique. My Glenwood Oak 114 has the original brick which makes the fire pot 12 inches. The coal tends to bridge a bit which makes shaking very quick without dropping much coal even with large rotation. The larger fire pots I don't think will bridge like this so have to be more delicate when shaking.

michaelanthony wrote:Look at the piece of 'nut from Reading has been running a little bigger than Blaschak this year!

Mike,When you asked for nut size, are you sure they didn't mean "coconut" ?

The first pic is what I've been getting a lot of this year. About a two dozen pieces this size in each bucket full, . . . unless I dig in the middle of the pile, under where the coal shut ended.

Glenwood says to use stove coal in my kitchen range. These larger sizes are ok for quick heat-up and lots of high cooking temps, but for over-night, it burns up too quickly in the small firebox of my range. Night time I load it up with the smaller pieces and flick the bigger pieces off the shovel and back into the bucket for day time cooking.

franco b wrote:The Glenwoods with prismatic grates have a pretty large space between grates and that space gets a lot larger quickly as you rotate the grate. I think this is the reason for the preference for stove coal, as the larger pieces don't drop through as easily. Leaving more ash on the grate and shaking with very short strokes makes the problem less.

These are very aggressive grates but clear the ash very quickly and easily. You just have to learn the technique. My Glenwood Oak 114 has the original brick which makes the fire pot 12 inches. The coal tends to bridge a bit which makes shaking very quick without dropping much coal even with large rotation. The larger fire pots I don't think will bridge like this so have to be more delicate when shaking.

I don't know about the base heaters, but the grate spacing is ok for nut coal on both my Glenwood range and the 118. The spaces are about big enough to only fit a sharpie pen through the biggest part of the gap formed between the tips of the triangles and the next grate bar.

KingCoal wrote:the thing i have seen in vids of people tending these stoves is that the grates get "jiggled" more than shook and never anything approaching 45* of rotation.

is that impression incorrect ?

It depends upon what you are doing with the shaking - If I want to shake a little, I'll just rock them back and forth a bit. If I have a lot of ash to get out, I'll spin them 360 degrees... More ash? spin several times...

I'm still learning the ropes with my 116. I started out with nut but was able to come up with stove size too and I like using both at different times. I'll use the stove size when I want to build the fire back up such as when I reload and then top it off with nut for the extended burn. I've been using Kimmel and Blaschak in both sizes. The stove size stuff from both companies are about equal but the Kimmel nut size has been much cleaner and more consistent in size. I could live with either but the Kimmel gets the nod because I don't need to drive out of my way to get it.

If anything, I think I tend to shake too much based on the amount of unburned coal I'm finding in my ash. I also seem to get bridging with almost every full load that I burn up. In the morning I'll shake down and find that only some of the ash comes down leaving the top burning layer of coal untouched. I have to poke it down with the shovel. I'll then get a little more ash out and only then see the glow in the ash pan from the live coals above.

Eventually I'll figure out what works best with this stove. I'm still learning every day and enjoying the process very much. The good folks here on this forum deserve a big thanks for sharing their thoughts and knowledge. I'd never have attempted this without the help.

The weather here in Maine has been so mild I haven't had a fire going for 4 days now. Looks like we'll be back to winter in another day or so.

Oh, I should add that last week I found I could barely move the left pair of grates and had trouble shaking down that side. I finally let the stove go out to see what was going on. I was surprised to find a fist sized rock wedged in the grates! Not sure if it was a KImmel rock or a Blaschak rock.